I recently came across an article off Economy of Effort about keeping your pinky happy by swapping around caps lock with control. This is not new to most people, and is easy to do with Karabiner for OS X. Unfortunately my last Macbook is back home, and also terribly, terribly old (if anyone else has the black 2006, you paid $200 extra for the paint job and some extra RAM, life is tough).

Running GNU/Linux, there are two main options to modifying your key layout: xmodmap and setxkbmap. Both are shipped with a standard Fedora installation, and the guide linked above uses setxkbmap. Unfortunately, I found that after sending my computer to sleep, caps lock reverted to its usual behavior, and I had to pop a terminal to source .profile. Alternatively, I could bind a key to source it, but I had three issues with that:

First, I would have to remember to press the key binding every time my laptop locked.

Second, if I forgot and I hit caps lock expecting control, I would have to hit caps lock before I hit the keybinding, otherwise it simply would not fire.

Third, .profile was in fact being sourced. I knew this because I used xev to look at the keycodes and found that the other relevant line in the guide was indeed being applied.

xcape -e 'Caps_Lock=Escape'

So setxkbmap was the culprit here. I tried figuring out a way to make it work, but found myself yearning for xmodmap's simple config. Yeah, it wasn't powerful, but it worked consistently. Here are the contents of my .xmodmap: